Long before jihadist bombers in Iraq and Gaza made newspaper headlines, the face of suicidal fanaticism went by another name: kamikaze.

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These Japanese pilots, who were trained to crash into American warships and transports during World War II, captured the interest of filmmaker Risa Morimoto four years ago, after she made the chance discovery that her late uncle had been trained to be one of them. Eventually, an interest that began with family ties evolved into a documentary about kamikaze pilots, “Wings Of Defeat: Once We Were Kamikaze,” which will be shown in conjunction with her appearance at Ohio State tonight.

In a telephone interview with The Lantern, Morimoto, who grew up in the United States, said that she had grown up accepting the stereotype of kamikaze pilots as “suicidal fanatics.”

Morimoto said she was shocked when she discovered that her uncle, who she always remembered as a jokester, had trained as a kamikaze.

“The more I thought about it, the more I realized how disappointed I was in myself that I had never questioned who these men were,” Morimoto said. She also questioned why after more than 60 years, “the image of the kamikaze has remained the same,” she said.

Morimoto thought if she, a Japanese-American, still struggled with such one-dimensional stereotypes of those men, “then there were probably a lot of other people that felt the same way.”

So she decided to make a film that would help tell the story of the men who became terrifying legends.

She found a Web site run by Bill Gordon of Wesleyan University, whose site includes American and Japanese views of the kamikaze as well as poignant poems and letters from pilots themselves. Gordon tipped her off to a kamikaze reunion in Japan.

“I knew that the film was either going to get made then or it wasn’t going to get made,” Morimoto said. “I had that one window of opportunity so I basically packed up my bags and went.”

Getting the aging survivors to open up about their difficult experiences was not always easy, though. At the reunion, when she addressed the gathering and asked for people to participate in the film, nobody in the room full of 150 people volunteered.

“Essentially, I had to go through person to person,” Morimoto said of the painstaking process of interviewing the men.

Those who did share their wartime experiences were “very generous with their time” and uncommonly open with her, she said.

The film, which centers on interviews with four former kamikaze pilots, reveals them not as suicidal villains but as complicated and conflicted veterans of a difficult war. They tell of being drafted young, indoctrinated into their government’s cause, and finally trained to crash into American naval vessels.

Morimoto said she was surprised at how people have connected to the film on a personal level. People will often e-mail or talk to her after screenings, she said, sharing stories of relatives on the Japanese and American sides of the war. The reactions are sometimes emotional.

Young people, especially students, Morimoto said, often notice that the film’s depictions of war echo into a modern era.

“Even though this is something that seems isolated in the 1940s there are certain themes that resonate,” she said.

The screening of “Wings of Defeat: Once We Were Kamikaze,” sponsored by the East Asian Studies Center, Institute for Japanese Studies, and the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia, will be shown at 7 p.m. Friday in Jennings Hall room 155. The event is free and open to the public.

Jack Moore can be reached at [email protected].